Project Ideas

Primary Users:

People who are bed-bound or have limited mobility (whether due to disabilities, sickness, or injury). 

The Problem:

 In the U.S., “12.1% of U.S. adults may have a mobile disability with serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs” (“Disability Impacts”). People with limited mobility may face challenges simply fetching items in their apartment/household. Suppose a mobility-restricted patient wants a bottle of medicine handed to them, or a glass of water or snack from the kitchen, or a blanket from a bedroom closet. Without a caregiver, they must get up to fetch said item from a specific location in a house/apartment. It’s not an easy process to get up from a sitting position into a wheelchair. It’s daunting to get up if one has severe mobility disabilities, foot injuries, or is sick and bed-bound. Plus, in such cases, going down the stairs to fetch a single item would be a nightmare. Sick people may also struggle to be mobile. When I caught Covid for the first time, I got an extremely high fever for 3 days and was mostly bed-bound for that time period. I was lucky to have my family take care of me, but in the middle of night when I didn’t wish to wake them up, I often needed items. I remember my whole body was burning hot with a fever at 4 am, so I needed a glass of water and new icepack from downstairs, alongside desiring a small towel (from the bathroom) and fresh cotton shirt (from my closet). Yet, my body was tremendously weak and it was difficult to get up. I eventually said screw it and fetched those items, but it sucked because of the high fever and body soreness. A robot that simply fetches common items from various in-house locations can be very useful. It would help many people with limited mobility or people who are bed-bound (due to disabilities, temporary injury, and/or sickness).

Current solutions:

Caregiver: hiring one can be expensive for those who are sick or have disabilities. Aftearll, the caregiver needs to be available for so many hours in a day.  And even if one is hired, they can’t be there 24-7 since they must rest too.

Crutches/wheelchair: While these items can increase mobility, getting up and moving with these items isn’t necessarily easy. For instance, getting into a wheelchair can be a difficult process. Additionally, what if one desires an item that requires going down stairs in your house? What if one is feeling too weak to get up (fatigued, recovering from injury, etc.)? In such cases, these items alone won’t suffice..

Plan for everything: When a caregiver or someone is around, they could help someone with limited mobility theoretically stockpile extra supplies of everything they might need in their room or in close proximity (ex. Towels, snacks, clothes, medicine, etc.). However, humans can often make mistakes when planning ahead. Additionally, you only have so much room to stockpile items “near” individuals with limited mobility. What if a bed-bound patient desires some juice or a sweater? You can’t plan ahead for everything.

The Stretch Manipulator:

The Stretch mobile manipulator can bring common household items to the bed-bound or mobile-restricted person from anywhere in the house/apartment. The user would verbally request the robot for some item to fetch (ex. Medicine, towel, icepack, etc.). The robot would navigate to an appropriate room/area on the same floor (I don’t believe it can go down stairs). Using its mobile arms, it would find the item and/or take the item out from a container at an arbitrary height (ex. fridge/freezer, kitchen or bathroom cabinets, bedroom closets). It would grip said item and carry it back to the user. It would then await a future instruction. The user could also have a mobile app to control the robot (ask instructions, terminate search early, etc.)

The robot could be given an idea of the general apartment/house space, so it knows where different rooms are located and such. It would have a general association of common household items to rooms. It could also be directly programmed to fetch specific items from known locations (ex. Know where the bedroom closet, bathroom cabinets, and kitchen pantry/tap/glass cabinets are). A future addition would involve making the robot capable of “looking for” items it doesn’t know about by just knowing the layout/designated rooms of the house.

For our prototype, we would initially prioritize just 2 tasks to get something working: 1) fetching a small item (ex. medicine bottle) in a drawer in another room, 2) fetching a bowl of food from the fridge. A simpler alternative to task 2 could be fetching a snack from a closed pantry. An ambitious task (that we may not have time for) includes fetching a towel or shirt on a hanger inside a closed closet in another room.

Reaching out to target audience:

Leverage Reddit and post on communities to find users who are bed-bound or suffer from limited mobility due to disabilities, foot injuries or sickness. Ask them about their thoughts on this idea.

Primary User:

The primary user for the user is people who don’t have the hand dexterity or other bodily strength to be able to cook for themselves.

The Problem:

The problem is that currently people who are in bed are unable to make meals for themselves. They’re at the behest of caregivers who have to make meals for them or buy it themselves. Furthermore, for disabled individuals such as stroke victims who do not have the necessary hand dexterity. These aren’t just limited to physical challenges however, as shown in this article, those with mental disabilities can also struggle with cooking. 

Current Solution:

Obviously, the easiest solution is just to order takeout. But takeout costs can increasingly add up and those who are unable to cook are more often than not also unable to pick up food. Consequently, there are potentially additional costs from delivery, and physical challenges in picking up the food as well. The next obvious solution is just for the primary/secondary caregivers to cook and meal prep for the user. However, cooking ends up taking a lot of time and if the caregiver cannot be around when the user is hungry, then the user will need to contact the caregiver to cook for them or risk waiting. For those with limited hand mobility, there are also more ambitious solutions like human controlled robotic arms that can be used to cook. But those are extremely ambitious and require neural interfaces for complex set of commands that cooking could potentially end up requiring. 

The Stretch Manipulator:

I think that the stretch manipulator can potentially be used to cook some simple meals for the user. I was thinking somewhere along the lines of making rice, cooking eggs, making broth, or ramen. For the time being, I would generally want to stray away from using knives because of its danger in handing it to a robot, and stick more to cooking things that don’t require knives as much because of speed and safety. Although cooking eggs might be potentially complex, making rice and broths are certainly feasible if the manipulator can pick up pots, pans, and a spatula. At the moment, I believe that a robotics based solution is appropriate but it's just a matter of whether I’m able to abstract the core commands of what it is to cook a meal into the robot.